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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Al JamesORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Crowdwork platforms have been widely celebrated as challenging gendered labor market inequalities through new digitally mediated possibilities for reconciling work, home, and family. This paper interrogates those claims and explores the wider implications of digital labor platforms for an expansive work–family research agenda stubbornly rooted in formal modes of employment in the “analogue” economy. Based on ethnographic research with women platform workers in the UK (using PeoplePerHour, Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr, and Copify), the paper asks: what are women crowdworkers' lived experiences of integrating paid work and family relative to formal employment? And what coping tactics have women developed to reduce gendered work–family conflicts on digital labor platforms? In response to these research questions, the paper makes three contributions. First, it offers a critical review of recent commentary to theorize how disruptive innovations by digital labor platforms to recast long-standing definitions of “work”, “workers”, “managers”, and “employers” have served to position platforms and platform workers as somehow outside the analytical gaze of the expansive work–family research agenda. Second, it extends a growing alternative work–family analysis of platform work to examine the kinds of “work–life balance” (WLB) provision available to women crowdworkers in the absence of an employer; and how women's experiences of algorithmically mediated
Author(s): James A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Gender, Work and Organization
Year: 2024
Volume: 31
Issue: 2
Pages: 513-534
Print publication date: 01/03/2024
Online publication date: 10/11/2023
Acceptance date: 20/10/2023
Date deposited: 20/11/2023
ISSN (print): 0968-6673
ISSN (electronic): 1468-0432
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13087
DOI: 10.1111/gwao.13087
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